Long after Oppenheimer, the US is still paying benefits to people who were exposed to radiation from nuclear tests

• Decades after Oppenheimer, the US still pays benefits to people exposed to nuclear radiation.
• VA benefits apply to those involved in testing like the Manhattan Project or cleanups in the Marshall Islands.

Christopher Nolan's new film "Oppenheimer" follows the development of the first atomic bombs during World War II under the supervision of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The so-called "father of the atomic bomb" is tapped to helm the Los Alamos Laboratory where the Manhattan Project focused on developing a nuclear weapon faster than Nazi Germany, leading to a race against time.

And while most of the characters in "Oppenheimer" seem to understand the immediate, destructive impact of using atomic bombs on targets like the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they don't necessarily think of the long-term effects of creating — and using — such a powerful and devastating weapon.

Radiation exposure has been a persistent problem that the US is still dealing with today. Long after the creation and testing of that first nuclear weapon and the many more tests that followed, Washington is still paying benefits to veterans and civilians exposed to radiation from nuclear bomb tests and cleanups.

It was over 40 years after the first nuclear test, codenamed "Trinity," before the risks and dangers were officially recognized. The first acknowledgement of both the need to compensate servicemen and women effected by nuclear radiation and the linkage between cancers and certain illnesses and radiation exposure came in 1988, when Congress passed the Radiation-Exposed Veterans Compensation Act.

The bill was prompted by the concerns of "atomic veterans," individuals who had been present during atmospheric nuclear tests from 1946 to 1952 and who spoke out about the serious health complications that they developed from exposure to radiation.

The bill included specific diseases, including leukemia and certain other types of cancer but hedged on how serious the illness had to be and the timeline of when and how veterans had been exposed to radiation. It also defined "radiation-risk activity" as specifically being related to "onsite participation in the atmospheric detonation of a nuclear device," the US occupation of Hiroshima or Nagasaki between August 1945 and July 1946, and internment as a prisoner of war in Japan during World War II.

It offered $50,000 to individuals residing or working downwind of the Nevada Test Site (where decades of nuclear weapons testing took place), $75,000 for workers who participated in atmospheric weapons tests, and $100,000 for uranium miners, millers, and transporters. But while limited in scope, the Radiation-Exposed Veterans Compensation Act opened the floodgates for discourse around nuclear radiation effects and subsequent legislation providing further benefits.

In 1995, President Bill Clinton's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments released a thousand-page document detailing extensive investigations into questionable US government-led radiation experiments involving human test subjects during the Cold War.

Some of those subjects, as previously documented by Eileen Welsome's "The Plutonium Experiment" story and the Markey report, had been unknowingly and unwillingly injected with plutonium.

The report also acknowledged that atomic veterans who had been involved in nuclear testing or cleanup activities were unaware of the consequences, leading to Clinton's public apology on behalf of the US government in 1996 to all veterans and civilians involved with nuclear testing.

One atomic veteran who was sent to the Marshall Islands, where the US carried out dozens of nuclear weapons tests after World War II, to help with cleanup effort in the 1970s previously told Insider the potential dangers of the radiation were never properly addressed beforehand and that he didn't receive adequate training.

"On our end of it, most of our guys are dead because of the cancers and all the ailments that come along with the radioactive materials that we ingested," Ken Brownell said in an interview last year, adding that he had little protective gear. He said he was diagnosed in 2001 with stage-four non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and given months to live. But he managed to beat it.

Another atomic veteran who was sent to the Marshall Islands, Francis Lincoln Grahlfs, wrote in a 2021 Military Times op-ed that "little was known by the public about the long-term effects of radiation exposure." Like Brownell, he believes several health complications that he has suffered from, including cancer, are a result of the radiation.

Current VA benefits related to nuclear radiation exposure include cleanups at the Marshall Islands and Palomares, Spain, from a 1966 US Air Force plutonium accident. Atmospheric nuclear bomb testing, as well as radiation therapy for different illnesses or cancers, also qualifies.

There are other incidents as well that could see veterans or workers receive benefits. Those who were stationed at the McMurdo Antarctica nuclear plant from 1964 to 1973 and those that have worked with depleted uranium found in armor and munitions, such as the shells the US is sending to Ukraine, qualify. Most recently, service members involved in the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 and its cleanup can receive benefits.

The qualifications — and payouts — depend on what situation or circumstance veterans were involved in, as well as what specific cancer or illness they developed and how likely it is to be linked to radiation.

Nuclear weapons testing also devastated local communities, both in the US and abroad. Detonations on the Marshall Islands, for example, wreaked havoc on the environment and left individuals worried about the long-term impact of radiation exposure on their health.

Such was also the case after the Manhattan Project's Trinity Test, when, in July 1945, the world's first atomic bomb went off, sending radioactive fallout raining down on numerous people. Though this historically significant test was the feature of "Oppenheimer," the film appears to overlook the lasting local impacts of the world-changing explosion.